It is not fair to say certain desktop environment is faster than others only based on fgl_glxgears’s output. There are many more factors than, just having some FPS gain in an opengl tool to consider a desktop environment over others. One more fact to consider, a distro which has say e.g. twm as default window manager might have more benefits (ease of use, performance) than running on Ubuntu. Following results reflect the output on my hardware, and might be different on yours even on similar setup.

Few years back, I was even unable to boot without using acpi off. When catalyst drivers started working on this hardware, it started to become better every time. With this new release the performance was even better. I was eager, how each desktop environment take advantage of this, so I wrote this article.

I found openbox on ubuntu to be buggy, because it was trying to load many gnome applications at start, and crashed all of them. Without those gnome packages surely, the bugs would go away. Openbox and TWM does not seem like modern desktop, that everyone could use. Omitting those two results here is the list in terms of most FPS.

Note: Sorry I could not review KDE (repository in my country is broken), and all tests were done without enabling anything special e.g vsync etc.

Conclusion: As I said earlier, there are many other things determining the efficiency of a desktop system. For the same reason, I had to omit the results of TWM and OpenBox. Graphics card I use is not the newest one either. I expected overall result to be similar, though I think Gnome desktop had to be higher on the list. Since its ubuntu and not fedora, that seems fair too. It would be great to know results of you guys, if the ratio (considering graphics card) changes largely or even the list gets altered in your test.

I don’t much about fbo (may be frame buffer object). The frame buffer object architecture (FBO) is an extension to OpenGL for doing flexible off-screen rendering, including rendering to a texture – wikipedia